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The Freedom Riders, The U.S. Army, And Me

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Fifty years ago this past weekend, the Freedom Riders of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which included student leaders Diane Nash and John Lewis, decided — along with many other similarly committed young people — that it was time to integrate bus stations in the Southern United States that were hubs of racist segregation.

Monday night, PBS broadcast a historical documentary that chronicled the strategy and decision-making by the leadership of the civil rights movement for racial equality that strategically applied the practices of Mohatma Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience, to the arduous effort to desegregate and eliminate the “Jim Crow” practices of the Southern United States. As the documentary reflected, the young people who chose to ride the buses of freedom that fateful month of May 1961 changed America forever.

SNCC’s decision’s was predicated upon the radical notion that it was time to test the authority of a 1961 Supreme Court decision in Boynton v. Virginia, that overturned segregation of bus stations, their restaurants and restrooms, which had become glaring Jim Crow symbols of racial segregation throughout the South.

The first bus of Freedom Riders that arrived in Anniston, Alabama on May 14, –Mother’s Day that year — was immediately set upon by an organized assailants wielding chains and pipes, and having driven the occupants to the back of the bus, in a split moment of time, fire bombed the bus, burning most of the exterior, exposing its naked and jagged frame.

“Meanwhile, the Trailways bus arrived in Anniston, Alabama where the driver would not continue until the group sat segregated,” SNCC’s historical records show. “A violent group boarded the bus and beat the African-Americans sitting in the front, causing several injuries until the group was forced to the back of the bus. A mob carrying iron pipes greeted them on arrival in Birmingham, Alabama. Many were battered, knocked unconscious and hospitalized. The group gathered the next day and prepared to head on to Montgomery, but no bus would take them. A mob gathered as they waited in the white waiting room, and finally the group decided to fly back to New Orleans, ending the first ride.”

Although I was only six-years-old when the Anniston bus burning occurred, by the time I was a teenager, I had come to understand its historical importance as a weigh station on America’s long journey toward achieving racial equality and dignity.

Anniston had become notorious for its violent acts of brazen racism and was an embarrassment on a world stage for the Kennedy Administration, who was planning the young president’s first international trip to meet with European heads of state. Indeed, Anniston’s bus burning and vicious attack on unarmed Freedom Riders would bear the heavy burden of ugly racism for many decades to come.

 

The card read something like, “You are not welcome in this establishment.” Of course, it did not say, “You are not welcome in this establishment because you are black,” or because I was associating with a black person, but we knew and understood its ugly message instantly.


 

Not only would Anniston’s bus burning serve as a barometric measure in my life for one of the ugliest incidents of racism in American history, but it would also become my unexpected home on two different occasions during my 15-year Army career.

The first time I enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1974, I was sent to Ft. McClellan, Alabama for the Women’s Army Corps boot camp (I also had my first kiss there with a woman in the laundry room of Charlie Company, 2nd WAC Battalion.) I returned to Anniston in 1986 as a U.S. Army Second Lieutenant to attend officer’s basic course and served four more years at Ft. McClellan, before posting to Hawaii, where I served as a company commander.

During this assignment in Alabama, I bought a house in Anniston which exposed me to homegrown racial prejudice. The most memorably painful incident occurred during a lunch I was sharing with an Army colleague, an African-American woman, who was also a Second Lieutenant. While eating, a white man walked past us and laid a card on the table’s edge and immediately left the restaurant’s premises after his banal act. The card read something like, “You are not welcome in this establishment.”

Of course, it did not say, “You are not welcome in this establishment because you are black,” or because I was associating with a black person, but we knew and understood its ugly message instantly. We quickly left the restaurant and turned the card into Ft. McCllellan’s office of civil rights, hoping they would look into the incident and perhaps put it “off-limits” to base personnel.

Nothing came of our complaint and because our daily lives were otherwise consumed with training and graduating, we moved on. But that moment made me aware that intolerance was alive and well in Anniston, even though the Army and the city talked a good game about acceptance and respect for others. It would not be my last experience of feeling the sting of racism in Anniston and in other American locales, which not only punishes and humiliates African-Americans, but calls on White people to confront its ugly specter or become ashamed because of our complicity with the racists.

Anniston’s notorious history came into stark relief when I was assigned to serve as an escort officer for Brigadier General Sherian Cadoria, the first African-American female general in the military, who was making a return visit to Ft. McClellan in February 1986 in honor of Black History month. A beautifully striking woman, Sherian Cadoria was tough as nails, disciplined, precise, she would prove to be a generous mentor to me through the remainder of my career.

Cadoria, a deeply religious person, grew up as a child of tenant farmers and by the age of ten years, was picking at least 200 pounds of cotton daily. Her mother raised her to be proud, despite whatever humiliations she would sustain as a young African-American girl growing up in Louisiana. Her rise to the rank of General is a classic Horatio Alger American story.

I was thrilled with this assignment and thoroughly prepared for her arrival. This would be at least her fourth return to Ft. McClellan for Brig. Gen. Cadoria and her first as a general staff officer. She had entered the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) officer basic course in 1960, at Ft. McClellan, just months before the violent disruption of the Freedom Riders arrival at the local bus station. She returned for perhaps one of her most challenging assignments to Ft. McClellan in the 1970s when she became its Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) officer, with specific responsibilities to interact with the Anniston community (during her assignments at Ft. McClellan she never lived “locally”–an impossibility she told me that apparently all black officers and soldiers adhered to as well.)

For Cadoria, this assignment must have been a frightening, yet, an empowering one. She later told me that the Army calculated to send her to Ft. McClellan, because of its rancidly racist past. They wanted Cadoria and the powerful symbol of who she was, in Anniston to work on bringing the local community in line with the Army’s goal to advance racial equality in the ranks.

I still think sending Cadoria to Anniston in the 1970s was a rather radical idea, especially for the U.S. Army. They could have not sent anyone more effective. She later returned to Ft. McClellan, to command a basic training battalion, before going onto commanding a CID brigade level command in Atlanta that led to her selection to brigadier general.

Cadoria, who retired from the Army in 1990, (the same year I decided to leave as well,) and I remained in contact over the next four years after I left Ft. McClellan for command in Hawaii. In a personally inscribed note to me on her official photo (above), after her 1986 visit to Anniston, she wrote “always remember our soldiers…god bless you.”

The Freedom Riders destroyed the yoke of Jim Crow in Anniston and beyond, and Sherian Cadoria, a tenant farmer’s daughter, would become a major symbol for the Army as it strove to confront racism in Anniston, through her presence at Ft. McClellan. I say god bless you General Cadoria and other brave souls like you, who followed the Freedom Riders by doing the difficult work of advancing racial justice.

The journey goes on, the work continues.

Tanya L. Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, who teaches about human rights in Eurasia and is a Harriman Institute affiliated faculty member. Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi worked internationally for more than a decade on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights, gender issues, sex trafficking, and media freedom.

Read Tanya Domi’s most-recent previous article at The New Civil Rights Movement, “Facing the 21st Century: A Brave New World of Challenge, Change and Caution.”

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News

‘Assassination of Political Rivals as an Official Act’: AOC Warns Take Trump ‘Seriously’

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15 hours ago

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April 25, 2024

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Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is responding to Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was a U.S. president, and she delivered a strong warning in response.

Trump’s attorney argued before the nation’s highest court that the ex-president could have ordered the assassination of a political rival and not face criminal prosecution unless he was first impeached by the House of Representatives and then convicted by the Senate.

But even then, Trump attorney John Sauer argued, if assassinating his political rival were done as an “official act,” he would be automatically immune from all prosecution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, presenting the hypothetical, expressed, “there are some things that are so fundamentally evil that they have to be protected against.”

RELATED: Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

“If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person, and he orders the military, or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?” she asked.

“It would depend on the hypothetical, but we can see that could well be an official act,” Trump attorney Sauer quickly replied.

Sauer later claimed that if a president ordered the U.S. military to wage a coup, he could also be immune from prosecution, again, if it were an “official act.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, a retired U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security affairs, was quick to poke a large hole in that hypothetical.

“If the president suspends the Senate, you can’t prosecute him because it’s not an official act until the Senate impeaches …. Uh oh,” he declared.

RELATED: Justices Slam Trump Lawyer: ‘Why Is It the President Would Not Be Required to Follow the Law?’

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blasted the Trump team.

“The assassination of political rivals as an official act,” the New York Democrat wrote.

“Understand what the Trump team is arguing for here. Take it seriously and at face value,” she said, issuing a warning: “This is not a game.”

Marc Elias, who has been an attorney to top Democrats and the Democratic National Committee, remarked, “I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, a former U.S. Ambassador and White House Special Counsel for Ethics and Government Reform under President Barack Obama, boiled it down: “Trump is seeking dictatorial powers.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

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Justices’ Views on Trump Immunity Stun Experts: ‘Watching the Constitution Be Rewritten’

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18 hours ago

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April 25, 2024

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Legal experts appeared somewhat pleased during the first half of the Supreme Court’s historic hearing on Donald Trump’s claim he has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was the President of the United States, as the justice appeared unwilling to accept that claim, but were stunned later when the right-wing justices questioned the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s attorney. Many experts are suggesting the ex-president may have won at least a part of the day, and some are expressing concern about the future of American democracy.

“Former President Trump seems likely to win at least a partial victory from the Supreme Court in his effort to avoid prosecution for his role in Jan. 6,” Axios reports. “A definitive ruling against Trump — a clear rejection of his theory of immunity that would allow his Jan. 6 trial to promptly resume — seemed to be the least likely outcome.”

The most likely outcome “might be for the high court to punt, perhaps kicking the case back to lower courts for more nuanced hearings. That would still be a victory for Trump, who has sought first and foremost to delay a trial in the Jan. 6 case until after Inauguration Day in 2025.”

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who covers the courts and the law, noted: “This did NOT go very well [for Special Counsel] Jack Smith’s team. Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh think Trump’s Jan. 6 prosecution is unconstitutional. Maybe Gorsuch too. Roberts is skeptical of the charges. Barrett is more amenable to Smith but still wants some immunity.”

READ MORE: ‘To Do God Knows What’: Local Elections Official Reads Lara Trump the Riot Act

Civil rights attorney and Tufts University professor Matthew Segal, responding to Stern’s remarks, commented: “If this is true, and if Trump becomes president again, there is likely no limit to the harm he’d be willing to cause — to the country, and to specific individuals — under the aegis of this immunity.”

Noted foreign policy, national security and political affairs analyst and commentator David Rothkopf observed: “Feels like the court is leaning toward creating new immunity protections for a president. It’s amazing. We’re watching the Constitution be rewritten in front of our eyes in real time.”

“Frog in boiling water alert,” warned Ian Bassin, a former Associate White House Counsel under President Barack Obama. “Who could have imagined 8 years ago that in the Trump era the Supreme Court would be considering whether a president should be above the law for assassinating opponents or ordering a military coup and that *at least* four justices might agree.”

NYU professor of law Melissa Murray responded to Bassin: “We are normalizing authoritarianism.”

Trump’s attorney, John Sauer, argued before the Supreme Court justices that if Trump had a political rival assassinated, he could only be prosecuted if he had first been impeach by the U.S. House of Representatives then convicted by the U.S. Senate.

During oral arguments Thursday, MSNBC host Chris Hayes commented on social media, “Something that drives me a little insane, I’ll admit, is that Trump’s OWN LAWYERS at his impeachment told the Senators to vote not to convict him BECAUSE he could be prosecuted if it came to that. Now they’re arguing that the only way he could be prosecuted is if they convicted.”

READ MORE: Biden Campaign Hammers Trump Over Infamous COVID Comment

Attorney and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa warned, “It’s worth highlighting that Trump’s lawyers are setting up another argument for a second Trump presidency: Criminal laws don’t apply to the President unless they specifically say so…this lays the groundwork for saying (in the future) he can’t be impeached for conduct he can’t be prosecuted for.”

But NYU and Harvard professor of law Ryan Goodman shared a different perspective.

“Due to Trump attorney’s concessions in Supreme Court oral argument, there’s now a very clear path for DOJ’s case to go forward. It’d be a travesty for Justices to delay matters further. Justice Amy Coney Barrett got Trump attorney to concede core allegations are private acts.”

NYU professor of history Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert scholar on authoritarians, fascism, and democracy concluded, “Folks, whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and and involves giving them a respected platform.”

The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal offered up a prediction: “Court doesn’t come back till May 9th which will be a decision day. But I think they won’t decide *this* case until July 3rd for max delay. And that decision will be 5-4 to remand the case back to DC, for additional delay.”

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Doesn’t Care if Pregnant Women Live or Die’: Alito Slammed Over Emergency Abortion Remarks

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Justices Slam Trump Lawyer: ‘Why Is It the President Would Not Be Required to Follow the Law?’

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20 hours ago

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April 25, 2024

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Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court hearing Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity early on appeared at best skeptical, were able to get his attorney to admit personal criminal acts can be prosecuted, appeared to skewer his argument a president must be impeached and convicted before he can be criminally prosecuted, and peppered him with questions exposing what some experts see is the apparent weakness of his case.

Legal experts appeared to believe, based on the Justices’ questions and statements, Trump will lose his claim of absolute presidential immunity, and may remand the case back to the lower court that already ruled against him, but these observations came during Justices’ questioning of Trump attorney John Sauer, and before they questioned the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s Michael Dreeben.

“I can say with reasonable confidence that if you’re arguing a case in the Supreme Court of the United States and Justices Alito and Sotomayor are tag-teaming you, you are going to lose,” noted attorney George Conway, who has argued a case before the nation’s highest court and obtained a unanimous decision.

But some are also warning that the justices will delay so Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump will not take place before the November election.

READ MORE: ‘To Do God Knows What’: Local Elections Official Reads Lara Trump the Riot Act

“This argument still has a ways to go,” observed UCLA professor of law Rick Hasen, one of the top election law scholars in the county. “But it is easy to see the Court (1) siding against Trump on the merits but (2) in a way that requires further proceedings that easily push this case past the election (to a point where Trump could end this prosecution if elected).”

The Economist’s Supreme Court reporter Steven Mazie appeared to agree: “So, big picture: the (already slim) chances of Jack Smith actually getting his 2020 election-subversion case in front of a jury before the 2024 election are dwindling before our eyes.”

One of the most stunning lines of questioning came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who said, “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into Office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes. I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is, from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

READ MORE: ‘Doesn’t Care if Pregnant Women Live or Die’: Alito Slammed Over Emergency Abortion Remarks

She also warned, “If the potential for criminal liability is taken off the table, wouldn’t there be a significant risk that future presidents would be emboldened to commit crimes with abandon while they’re in office? It’s right now the fact that we’re having this debate because, OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] has said that presidents might be prosecuted. Presidents, from the beginning of time have understood that that’s a possibility. That might be what has kept this office from turning into the kind of crime center that I’m envisioning, but once we say, ‘no criminal liability, Mr. President, you can do whatever you want,’ I’m worried that we would have a worse problem than the problem of the president feeling constrained to follow the law while he’s in office.”

“Why is it as a matter of theory,” Justice Jackson said, “and I’m hoping you can sort of zoom way out here, that the president would not be required to follow the law when he is performing his official acts?”

“So,” she added later, “I guess I don’t understand why Congress in every criminal statute would have to say and the President is included. I thought that was the sort of background understanding that if they’re enacting a generally applicable criminal statute, it applies to the President just like everyone else.”

Another critical moment came when Justice Elena Kagan asked, “If a president sells nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, is that immune?”

Professor of law Jennifer Taub observed, “This is truly a remarkable moment. A former U.S. president is at his criminal trial in New York, while at the same time the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing his lawyer’s argument that he should be immune from prosecution in an entirely different federal criminal case.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Blood on Your Hands’: Tennessee Republicans OK Arming Teachers After Deadly School Shooting

 

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